Re: French phonetics

Isn't there really any practical way to avoid the constant shifting
of the stress to the last syllable in French transliterations or
transcriptions of foreign names/words (with the latter being
historically always treated as if they were French terms)? Or is
this the same case as that with the Japanese
transliteration "makudonarudo" for McDonald (etc.)?

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Prosodic features like length, stress, tone make no sense to monolingual
French speakers.
I suppose they don't even "hear" them.
Arnaud

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So goes for all other foreign names pronounced by native French
speakers, whether they are transliterated from a non-Roman script or
not. They are, to make ot clearer, treated as if they were
some "bizarre" French names. No effort is made to pronounce them
correctly.

Regards,
Francesco

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You need an awful lot of linguistic knowledge to know how to read <ch>
k in Italian but
ts^ in Spanish and English
s^ in French
x in German and Polish
retroflex ts^H in Chinese.
Etc.

How can you expect this from the ordinary man in the street ?

Arnaud